I wanted to stand up during the meeting to tell our story too, but I didn’t know if my voice would hold steady, and I wanted nothing of putting myself up for pity, this being my first time speaking in a room full of strangers. It was while I was urging myself to stand that I saw a slim man get up to join the line that had formed for those who wanted to speak. I saw that stringy hair moving toward the front, and I knew it was him. Austin.
He greeted the crowd good evening when his turn came. He said it was only his second time coming to this meeting; he’d lived for several years overseas and had attended dozens of meetings of this nature, and from them he had learned a great deal. He didn’t know what he would do if such meetings didn’t exist, opportunities for solidarity with the likes of us. If not for them, what would we do with all our anger? Put it in a bottle and light a fire in it and turn it into a good bomb, someone shouted. The room roared in laughter. Austin chuckled. He’d been to many places and seen the extent of human depravity, he said, but he still didn’t know what he could attribute it to—greed seemed too trite a reason. All he knew was that there was much that we still needed to understand about ourselves before we could find solutions. There was one village he’d been to, he went on, he didn’t know what the solution for the people there might be. He wanted to share their story still, because it was a story some people in the room might have read in the newspapers, but none had likely been to that place, except for him.
After the meeting, people gathered around to ask him questions about this village. I waited my turn, my heart pounding—it was all too strange. My turn came. I greeted him, smiling. He smiled back but said nothing, perhaps waiting for me to ask him a question. Unsure of what to say, I blurted out that I was Bongo’s niece. His brow twisted; he seemed to be struggling to remember Bongo. Bongo, from Kosawa, I said. He remained confused. I repeated it, and whispered that I was there on the afternoon when the soldiers came. It was then that the look on his face changed to a blend of astonishment and something tender I can’t describe.
I can’t tell you how tightly he hugged me, or how much I’d longed for a hug like that since the day I left Kosawa. After we separated, I saw his face clearly—he was still prettier than any man I’ve ever seen. His hair was still as long as when we first saw him and some of the girls had giggled as they wished they could have hair as plentiful as his. Where he once had the residual softness of boyhood, though, he now had hard lines of manhood running around his face. It occurred to me that he had to be around the age my father was when he vanished.
We found two chairs at the back of the room. He asked me how I was settling in New York. He apologized for not having contacted me; the Sweet One had written to tell him that I would be arriving and ask if he could help me if I ever found myself in need of assistance. Austin said he told the Sweet One he would do whatever he could while I was here, but his newspaper job had him traveling all over the country; rarely was he in his apartment, in an area called Brooklyn. He’d actually forgotten that I was in the city; he didn’t mean to be rude when I came up to him, he was only trying to understand why a stranger was talking about Bongo.
I nodded, averting my eyes from his, which were aglow with gentleness.
I asked him if he’d left our country of his own volition or if he’d been forced to flee. He told me his uncle’s death and the massacre still haunted him, but he would have remained in our country given the chance—he loved its people. The decision to leave or stay, though, wasn’t his. Two weeks after pictures of the massacre appeared in his newspaper in America, soldiers arrived at his door to escort him to the airport. They told him that His Excellency did not want in his country any newspaperman who made up fake stories—doing so meant that Austin was His Excellency’s enemy, and thus the enemy of his people. Austin would have been glad to tell me more that night, I could see, but I knew I would meet him again, so I didn’t ask if that meant he could never return to our country again. Besides, he had to leave to meet someone for a story. So we had another hug, and he held my hand as we walked out of the building onto the street, letting go only at the last moment. Watching him walk away, I couldn’t decide whether he’d held my hand because he had a history with Bongo, or because the Sweet One had asked him to watch over me, or because he wanted to, for his sake, not for anyone else’s.
We’ve seen each other twice since that day—he’s come to visit me at school. We mostly talk about Kosawa and about how he wishes he could have done more for us. Not since my evenings on our veranda with my father have I sat down and spent so much time with someone else pondering life’s whys. He and I will be seeing each other next month. He’ll take me to this place called Brooklyn—I hear I can find food as good as ours there, I’m desperate for a tasty meal. But for now, what I’m eager to do is to return to the Village Meeting. I want to meet someone, a man who spoke at the previous meeting. This man, named Maxim, said something that opened my eyes, something I must tell you.